


Shining Tigers

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, loving, safe, sane, sober
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-31 14:19:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18593002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: Yet another first time. This one was aimed at a very conscious, planned, open-eyed "courtship" of two old friends. Tons of love and romance, but almost no coyness, twee, or lack of awareness of what's going on. They are two experienced adult men who decide what they want to do with each other, and do it.I am hoping it's sexy in spite of lacking so many common romance tropes. Part of me wants to know if sexy can escape the power games and the shy-bride trope and the hesitation and the ignorance, and exist in text based on simple mindful love and desire.





	Shining Tigers

If they had stuck with the original schedule, they’d have met officially 187 times; however, the schedule had never been a perfect reflection of reality. It couldn’t be: scheduling to talk about Sherlock Holmes involved some reflection of Sherlock’s own erratic activities. There had been a few months Lestrade had sent the message that there was nothing to report; more months when he’d asked for more frequent updates. A few months when Mycroft had been clinging to Lestrade’s sleeve nigh-on to begging for daily reports. In the end they’d met in their official capacity exactly 213 times over a period of just a little over 15 years.

During that time each man had experienced good times and bad. They’d been together during Mycroft’s lightening-fast leap up the bureaucratic ladder of MI-6. During Lestrade’s divorce. During Mycroft’s brief fall from glory after the difficulties with the Adler woman…and his renewed rise after he successfully recruited her for “our” side. They’d weathered Lestrade’s loss of face during and after Sherlock’s apparent “suicide.” Between them they’d proved superb at handling Sherlock, that mercurial British asset—to his unending disgust. It was not, he pointed out, that he so much minded fighting alongside the angels, as it was their endless success at controlling his non-angelic, sinful nature.

He was not amused to find himself belled like the cat, and trapped in comparative obedience and discipline. What was the fun in being an asset if you couldn’t bounce around playing merry games with James Bond stereotypes and putting on a nice Byronic show? Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Big Brother and Gavin ruined the game far too effectively…

But ruin it they did, with their rare meetings and their eternal observation. When they won another round, they’d exchange a quiet, amused glance, eyes meeting, smiling, and moving away, leaving an odd sense of warmth in the air, and the illusion of the scent of gingerbread and peppermint and Christmas treats.

They were two proper professionals, caught up in a collegial bond. They shared meals over meetings. Had the occasional pint in a pub. They knew each other in far greater depth and intimacy than either showed, and in far less than scandal and gossip occasionally suggested. They worked within conservative professional limits. Each knew in a quiet, formal way, of the other’s sexual alignment. Each had cautiously let it be known that he found the other attractive, while finding their situation profoundly otherwise.

They were professionals, to the bone. To the very marrow of the bone.

They were also, as partners in the various security agencies so often are, friends. It doesn’t matter if you’re a couple of beat cops in a zebra car, patrolling your patch, or a pair of field agents working together in a shared field, or if you were two gentleman spies set to keep watch on Sherlock Holmes—there was a friendship that grew over the years, over the meetings, over the shared pints, over the exchanged notes, over the paperwork, over review under the skeptical eyes of Lady Smallwood and Sir Edwin, with little Miss Norbury taking notes.

There were, as noted, those shared glances, pregnant with smiles and holiday humor. There were more. Shared little jokes. Pictures of Sherlock sent from Lestrade’s phone to Mycroft’s. Stories of a secluded, unhappy boyhood drawn from Mycroft’s memories. Fleeting discussions of coming out—or failing to. They kept a carefully maintained distance, while somehow transcending that limit, and reducing that distance.

And so it was that, when Lestrade began to feel the restlessness, it was Mycroft who actually noticed it. He noticed the slight increase in tension; the eyes watching with renewed hunger; the fingers flexing, touching in suppressed imagination bits and pieces of bodies that were not even consciously within Lestrade’s awareness.

Mycroft considered a wide range of possible physical ailments that could lead to increased libido in a man of Lestrade’s age. Without saying anything but that health was a constant concern to MI-6, Mi-5, and the Met, he successfully manipulated his partner into scheduling a full, painstaking physical—to which he covertly added a few items for the doctor to explore. So  Lestrade came to find his love-life questioned in disturbing detail for a divorced professional man in his mid-fifties.

“No, go-on with you. I've no time for that sort of thing, and even if I did I’m too old for the kind of silliness people get up to.” He dismissed it with a crisp flick of his hand, and laughed. “Who’m I gonna get it on with, anyway? No chance to go out on the pull. Most th’ people I know are on my teams, or I’m on theirs, and it’s a fraternizing thing…and even when you can argue for it, why would you want to put partners in jeopardy? No, not me—though I’ll admit to a bit more of an itch than I’ve had in awhile.” He chuckled, ruefully. “Figured it was either me finally getting past Donna and the divorce, or maybe just some odd side effect of getting older. Not as wild as when I was a boy, but…” His voice drifted to a stop, and for a long, yearning moment his eyes burned. Then he laughed again and looked at the doctor. “Yeah. Itch. Got the itch bad—worse than in decades. But an itch is just an itch, I reckon—and I’ve known what to do about an itch since I was ten. Good with my hands, me. No harm in that, and it’s been a bit of fun to find I still had the juice in me.”

We shall not ask how Mycroft obtained the notes from that session. He was pleased that the broad array of issues he’d feared were contraindicated by witness or by test. There were no brain tumors, or tumors of the reproductive organs, or problems with the overall endocrinal balances. DCI Lestrade was a healthy, hearty, lustful man in his prime. Nothing less—nothing worse—nothing more.

It was not, however, surprising that, knowing this, Mr. Holmes began to develop a similar itch. Nor, given his temperament, was it a surprise that he began to consider solutions to the problem.

They could each frequent certain well known professionals. It was a common answer: discreet men of high standards of health, rumored to provoke powerful responses from their clients. But Mr. Holmes found himself disturbed at the thought of using such services, and even more disturbed at the thought of Greg using such.

He didn’t notice himself thinking of his partner and friend as Greg.

His assistant, never slow on the mark, noticed what Mr. Holmes had not, and after due consideration, and a private discussion with Lady Smallwood about what would be considered appropriate and what would not, ventured a campaign that began with a simple statement.

“Mr. Lestrade is lonely.”

“He’s a healthy man in his prime, recovering from divorce. It’s not unusual.”

“Yes. But it would be a shame if loneliness caught him off guard. Better if he fell for one of our chaps or chappesses, if you get what I’m saying.” She smiled and set the hook. “I’m sure I could set him up with someone nice from the analysts pool.”

“You shall do nothing of the sort!” Mycroft snapped. “I will not have my partner…meddled with.”

She grinned, and winked. “Take care of it yourself, then,” she quipped. “I always do think it’s best when partners settle these things themselves, privately.”

Mycroft scoffed and scowled and told her she utterly misunderstood his point. But she knew that the important thing was that Mr. Holmes had not misunderstood her own point, and that he was now just that healthy, useful touch jealous of his own staff.

Awareness is a powerful thing. Like water dripping on stone, like ice freezing in the cracks of a stone fence, like stalagmites rising an inch at a time from the floor of a cavern, the two men’s desire built and changed them.

“You ought to go out more,” Mycroft told Lestrade, in the peevish tones of someone who wants nothing of the sort from his own point of view, but who wants it desperately for love of his friend. “Go on the pull, as it were. Chase tail…male r female.”

“And end up dancin’ in a pub after meetin’ online?” Lestrade shook his head and laughed. “Now there’s a nightmare in the making.” He tossed the remains of a chip to a stray dog on the pavement and smiled as the little beast leaped for it. “Not that it wouldn’t be nice in theory. With someone safe I could trust. But, nah. Not riskin’ it with just anybody.”

Mycroft simultaneously scowled and sparkled. “Well, no. Perhaps not just anybody. From our little circle of trusted colleagues, though, perhaps?”

The look he received from Lestrade’s dark eyes sang sarcasm—and friendly affection. “Go’arn,” he drawled, letting the Estuary tones drift sharply into Cockney. “Me? Who’d want me, anyway?”

“Oh, stop fishing for compliments, Greg,” Mycroft snapped. “You know perfectly well I consider you among my most decorative associates. You’re far from a shabby tiger. You’re more a ‘striped and shining tiger, all under the leaves of life.’”

Greg actually did know that quote: Mycroft had forced him to read the Dorothy Sayers “Lord Peter Whimsey” books years since. However, he had long since refused to be drawn into Holmesian quotation matches, so he feigned ignorance of the source. He couldn’t quite resist preening a little. “Maybe shining, if you like the grey.”

“Silver—purest silver. And it looks quite elegant on you,” Mycroft said.

Greg sparkled in is own right. “You think?”

“Of course I think, you daft bugger,” Mycroft exploded, exasperated. “Wasted, too—go out, man. Live. You’re lonely.”

Greg shrugged. “Tried, actually. Whatever it is, it’s not what I’m lonely for. Hand does the job and I don’t have to carry on a conversation with it in the morning.” His grin was mischievous, naughty, brave—and lonely. His eyes met Mycroft—as warm, as laughing, as knowing as when they exchanged glances over Sherlock. “But you’ll know all about that, then.” Before Mycroft could object, he added, “Na-na-nah. No denyin’ it, Mike. Birds of a feather, we two.”

Mycroft considered, his face still with the stillness of his near-supernatural reckoning. He straightened in his chair. His chin rose.

“Perhaps, then, you should come over to mine, sometime. Dinner. A drink. Whatever…”

The words stretched time between them like soft taffy on a summer day. It looped and strung out.

“Ah.” Lestrade blinked. Blinked again. Then grinned—an oddly quiet, shy grin. “If you think…”

“Bother it, Greg, I wouldn’t have said if I weren’t interested.” Mycroft sounded testy, and scared, and shy himself.

“Well, then. All right. Say…This Friday? Got the weekend free, now that I’m a mucketty-muck DCI.”

The weekend off, and time for “whatever” to include sleeping in and breakfast together.

Mycroft nodded, already dispassionately making a mental note to cancel the Brexit workshop he’d planned with the Parliament’s Brexit advisory committee. They were already proved hopeless. “Certainly. Seven o’clock. I’ll order in.

He did.

“You look good,” Lestrade said. “Not stuffy.” He paused, and then husked, softly, “Touchable.”

“That was the intent,” Mycroft said, and risked a merry smile. “And you seem likewise.”

“Touch whatever you like.”

They laughed—and shied away, instead eating a superb catered Coquilles St. Jacques starter, an entire platter of perfect mutton allowed to sit just long enough after roasting, mashed swedes, braised leeks, and apple-walnut salad. They finished with a moist, tender gateau.

“Marvelous.”

“Thank you. Tea?”

“Wouldn’t mind a cuppa.”

Lestrade followed Mycroft out to the kitchen, where before the electric kettle could even be filled the two men advanced on their identical goals, hands touching each other rather than the tea things.

Mycroft, his hands sidling down Lestrade’s shirt front, stepped further in, and initiated a kiss. When Lestrade sighed his desire back into Mycroft’s mouth, he felt the blood surge to his groin, and moaned, softly.

Neither needed much direction, beyond an occasional, “Mind if I take this off-a you?” or “You’re wearing entirely too many layers.”

“Only two layers.”

“Two more than you currently need.”

They both laughed as Mycroft winkled Lestrade out of both trousers and pants.

They didn’t talk about love. Not that night, or many nights to come. But—they were partners, and they were tender and hot and hungry with each other.

“Open for me, sweetheart.” It could have been either saying it, but it was Mycroft, attending to the friend he’d worried over for months. His hand explored, found the heavy, hard burden of Lestrade’s cock, his balls already pulled up tight and tense against his perineum. Mycroft twisted their bodies into place, using elegant human origami to curl Greg to lean in the turn of Mycroft’s shoulder, secure and supported, the sleek steel kitchen table under his hip, one leg rising to ride at Mycroft’s waist. That left Mycroft free to use both hands and his own prodding erection to rouse his partner.

They had lubricants of all sorts—manufactured, edible from the cupboards, and made by their own bodies. Soon the room smelled of fruit and semen and honey, and their fingers were sticky and their faces shone under the too-bright overhead light. Not that they cared: the sight of each other was exciting under that harsh glow.

“You want me.” It was demand, it was crowed victory, it was question—all in one.

“Yes.” It was boast, it was confession, it was possessive claim.

“Coming…”

“Come for me…”

Who came first didn’t matter. What mattered is that they kissed and touched after, amazed by their own contentment. They bathed at the sink, laughing at the ruin of a clean dish cloth.

Mycroft drew Greg into a warm hug, their hips leaning against the counter. Greg’s face was buried in Mycroft’s neck, and they were content…for now.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Mycroft asked. “I now it’s not strictly kosher. But—we’re different divisions, and different chains of command. And according to Lady Smallwood, it’s acceptable if we report it and fill out the paperwork.”

“I don’t mind, you great looby,” Greg chuckled. He kissed Mycroft’s nose-tip…then his cheek. Then his mouth. His hands sought south, cupping Mycroft’s bum, then trailing forward to his still-unsatisfied cock. “Take me to bed, sweetheart. I’m feeling itchy for you.”

Mycroft, just as itchy, led his lover to bed.


End file.
